Insta reels and YouTube shorts are clone of Tiktok with similar feed/algo and content.

[delayed]

Facebook and Instagram "short video shit" is at least partially overlapping. This incidentally creates a quite grating user experience.

Instagram does for reels and you occasionally get related pages popping up in your feed.

I occasionally see a post from someone I follow. 90% of what’s in my feed is either and ad or “suggested for you”.

When was the last time you used Instagram? Or Youtube? They're almost Tiktok clones at this point.

I only visit on mobile. I thought the middle film thing icon was to take your own photos/videos - because that’s what the center icon did on the YouTube app; the last time I had the app installed. Never occurred to me it’s a feed. O_o

Instagram as it exists today is a streamlined dopamine injection engine.

Variable rewards, instantaneous short-form tailored content, fear of missing out. It's carefully built for continuous user engagement.

They're bad Tiktok clones. Which in this case is a good thing - their inferior algorithms make the result less addicting.

I often get “For you” on the front app page instead of the accounts I’m following. This sometimes shows suggested pages.

You can switch to "Following" on front page and not get any algo recs but I don't think selection sticks.

Algo recs and reels nearly killed IG for me. It desperately tries to become TikTok but that's not why I signed up for IG (which was photos). Photos still exist, but even if you like every photo and "dislike" every reel for months it will still push 99% reel content in your feed--whatever ML they use has been near totally useless.

They introduced this recently. They do it just like TikTok.

I don't know if it was that recent? I abandoned the app two years ago because of the introduction of the algorithmic feed ( and the explore page, but at least you had to click on that )

> Instagram doesn’t have an algorithmic feed that introduce you to content - not that I know of.

That is literally their default mode. They had to introduce a "For You" feed (hidden behind a tap on Instagram logo) to go around EU regulations.

I must have missed it because I don’t follow anyone and just go directly to their pages manually.

Then you're in luck :)

Instagram's default feed is an abomination. For me it shows two posts from people I follow, and then an endless stream of ads and "suggested" content.

Thankfully I don't engage with Instagram much, and a few years back I muted/unfollowed a bunch of people, so the algorithmic feed is mostly okay: dogs, cats, climbing. But most of it is recycled regurgitated aggregator accounts

I basically stopped using Instagram because it only shows you algorithm feed, I see so little content from the people I follow

You can just switch to “following” mode, but it is an annoying extra step.

There is no way to set it as default. You have to do it everytime which is extremely annoying. Instagram clearly does not want you to only see posts from the people you follow.